This post is a 'last 9 months in review' sorta post. No renders in this one.
As I've stated before, for those of you that are waiting on Part 2 to be completed and zipped, we are still a ways off from that. I've been releasing panels as I finish them here for a while now, and will continue to do so, for the handful of you that are following this thread regularly.
For those that just want to ignore this thread until Part 2 is released in it's entirety, as I stated in my last post just keep an eye on the latest updates section of this forum, here:
https://f95zone.to/latest/#/cat=comics/page=1
Note that it may be another month or more before I am at that point. When the time comes, I'll be in touch with the appropriate people to propagate my Part 2 download, and to 'flag' this thread as updated so that it appears as recently updated in the latest updates.
My guess is that I'll probably post at least two more story panel updates here before I have the rest of the panels for Part 2. It's gonna be a while... I may also post some fanart pics when the whim strikes as well, as I've been doing up to this point.
For those needing a quick thread roadmap to find Panels 59-124, Part 2 starts
here, pauses around post #88/panel 80/81, and continues
here. The panels I've released so far are pretty much in chronological order, so you can follow the story pretty easily, just note the 'update jump' between from 88 and post 112. You can skip posts 89-111, as those are mostly chronicling my hardware issues and resulting solutions, and I recapped the few story panels I had done in that time in post 112. There are a few fanart pieces in there though if you care...
I just took a few minutes to read through this thread again. Wow! When I started Part 2 I figured it'd take a couple of months. Boy was that far off the mark!
A good part of the delay was hardware failure related. First my bricked uber dual 1080 laptop meant that I had to build a new rendering system, which took a few weeks to put together. Then the power supply failed on my new 4k monitor. I eventually tracked down a new power supply and the 4K monitor is doing fine now, but I wasn't sure if a dead power supply was the issue at the time. I was using my 1080P TV as a monitor in the meantime, but it eventually caught fire so I had to replace it. I never did get my new 4K TV and my rendering system to play nice, so I was effectively at a complete halt for a bit.
In short, I had more hardware failures in the last six months than I've had in the previous decade... thankfully none of those were hard drive/SSD related. I do backups every so often, but probably not as much as I should.
One annoying thing is that AMD STILL hasn't announced the 7nm Threadripper lineup. Those won't show up until Q4 at the earliest probably, so I'm making due with my single GPU rendering system in the meantime. It's getting the job done, but it's slower than my uber laptop was, even with the 1080 Ti. The 3950X 16 core AM4 Ryzen is tempting, but even that one won't show up until September, so I might as well wait on the next batch of Threadrippers and make do in the meantime.
The load times are significant for the panels I'm working on at the moment, and renders generally take more than an hour, even if I bail on them early. I usually end up re-doing renders 3-4 times as I see things that need adjusting, which adds to the time equation. Plus I'm working on other stuff too, so short form, SLOOOOOOOWWWWW!
I think that the various delays were all for the better though. I hadn't originally planned to dedicate 44 panels to Dee's alternate backstory, but I'm glad that I did. I wanted to share my vision of how she ended up becoming open to group sex, and her story was a bit complicated. It could easily have been longer, with a bunch more panels, but as I noted before, I wanted to get back to the story at hand. That and renders using Liv's house take longer to load and bake due to the added detail.
The 'club' renders I still need to do also take a long time. I won't have a lot of those to do, but the 4 gals chatting? Yeah those renders take a while to load, tweak, and bake... I just spent more than a day on one of the panels.
Anyways, back on topic, Meg's alternate backstory is a bit more straightforward, but that story isn't quite done yet. Trace and Kate's 'multi-partner' backstories were already pretty well established. Actually, Kat(i)e may not have done much of that as of yet in KC, but based on where her story was originally headed, that was a foregone conclusion IMHO. Nonetheless, I'll address both Trace and Kate's backstory briefly in Part 3. It's much simpler...
Anyways, I need to apologize for dragging this out. My initial estimate of 2 months ended up being overly ambitious, and if I had pushed to meet that deadline, well the Dee backstory would have been much shorter. So going forward, in the interest of not over-promising, I'm just gonna say 'eventually'...
As for how many more panels will be in part 2, I honestly don't know. I'm probably going to spend a little more time on a couple of the scenes, and generate a few more panels for those than I normally do, as those parts of the story would benefit from the additional attention. I do have my 'general story' sketched out, but as for specific panels yeah I figure those out on the fly for the most part. So I'll know when I get there as far as when Part 2 will wrap out, but I can't give anyone a hard estimate on how many more panels I'll need at this point.
This is why I continue to trickle out the story in batches. I know it's gonna be a while, but some people like to follow the story as it develops.
Anyways, that's my current update. Short form, Part 2 won't be done for a bit yet, I'm working on new panels, and your continued patience is appreciated!
